DocumentCode :
1419070
Title :
A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity
Author :
Poh, Ming-Zher ; Swenson, Nicholas C. ; Picard, Rosalind W.
Author_Institution :
Harvard-MIT Div., Health Sci. & Technol. (HST), Cambridge, MA, USA
Volume :
57
Issue :
5
fYear :
2010
fDate :
5/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
Firstpage :
1243
Lastpage :
1252
Abstract :
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a sensitive index of sympathetic nervous system activity. Due to the lack of sensors that can be worn comfortably during normal daily activity and over extensive periods of time, research in this area is limited to laboratory settings or artificial clinical environments. We developed a novel, unobtrusive, nonstigmatizing, wrist-worn integrated sensor, and present, for the very first time, a demonstration of long-term, continuous assessment of EDA outside of a laboratory setting. We evaluated the performance of our device against a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved system for the measurement of EDA during physical, cognitive, as well as emotional stressors at both palmar and distal forearm sites, and found high correlations across all the tests. We also evaluated the choice of electrode material by comparing conductive fabric with Ag/AgCl electrodes and discuss the limitations found. An important result presented in this paper is evidence that the distal forearm is a viable alternative to the traditional palmar sites for EDA measurements. Our device offers the unprecedented ability to perform comfortable, long-term, and in situ assessment of EDA. This paper opens up opportunities for future investigations that were previously not feasible, and could have far-reaching implications for diagnosis and understanding of psychological or neurological conditions.
Keywords :
bioelectric phenomena; biomedical electrodes; body area networks; neurophysiology; patient diagnosis; skin; Ag-AgCl electrodes; FDA approved system; artificial clinical environments; biomedical electrode material; cognitive stressors; conductive fabric; distal forearm; electrodermal activity; emotional stressors; normal daily activity; palmar sites; patient diagnosis; physical stressors; sympathetic nervous system activity; unobtrusive long-term assessment; wearable sensor; wrist-worn integrated sensor; Electrodermal activity (EDA); forearm; galvanic skin response; skin conductance; sweat; sympathetic nervous system; wearable sensors; wrist; Clothing; Equipment Design; Equipment Failure Analysis; Galvanic Skin Response; Humans; Monitoring, Ambulatory; Reproducibility of Results; Sensitivity and Specificity; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Sympathetic Nervous System; Telemetry; Transducers;
fLanguage :
English
Journal_Title :
Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Publisher :
ieee
ISSN :
0018-9294
Type :
jour
DOI :
10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487
Filename :
5415607
Link To Document :
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